Survivors in the Peripheries — Regional Futures

Neha Gupta, PhD

I have been conducting fieldwork in Bhiwandi-Nizampur and slowly gaining access to the tiers of power that operate here. What is becoming increasingly clear is that swathes of Bhiwandi city exist outside of planned contours. Neglected for ages, it grew organically along any accessible channels. This unregulated, unplanned, and undocumented development has to be placed at the heart of any effort to understand the dynamics of urbanisation in Bhiwandi. Primarily a migrant township, Bhiwandi’s unruly growth is not the residue that has oozed out of state-made boundaries; it is central to its identity.

We are putting together a timeline to chart the development of Bhiwandi-Nizampur to the contemporary moment, which has proven to be an onerous task because of the lack of ‘official’ records about the city (see Figure 1). However, the story of Bhiwandi’s development can be distilled from the oral narratives of its inhabitants. Bhiwandi is largely associated with textile production. It is credited to be the second biggest producer of textiles in India, after Surat. Before the nineteenth century, Bhiwandi was a small town, and the main occupations of the people were agriculture, fishing, and handloom. In the late nineteenth century, cloth production expanded in the handloom towns of the Bombay Presidency, and thousands of artisans from the failing artisanal regions of other parts of the subcontinent settled in these weaving towns (Haynes, 2013).

A timeline of events that have influenced Bhiwandi’s development

Moreover, after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, people from the eastern and northern regions of the subcontinent fled to the western parts to escape the backlash of the revolt. The effects of the revolt were less severe here. Informal settlements absorbed this huge influx of people. Bhiwandi, around this period, was also a rice-trading hub. Some respondents suggest that the growth of the power loom industry is, in some ways, also connected to the decline of the rice mills. The World Wars caused tremendous losses to the rice mills because of the price ceiling imposed by the colonial government, making them financially untenable.

Shrinking agricultural incomes precipitated by the Great Depression exacerbated the financial woes of the rice mills and put pressure on the handlooms of the textile sector. Power looms slowly started displacing handlooms. Because of mechanisation, power looms could manufacture cloth at several times the speed of a handloom, with only a marginal increase in operating costs. To meet wartime consumption needs, the government started patronising the power looms. To capitalise on these benefits, power loom owners quickly organised themselves into societies to access yarns directly from the state, bypassing the yarn merchants. The power looms, therefore, started thriving.

“If you drink water from here, you will come back”

Bhiwandi is a city of survivors inhabited by those dispossessed as the outcome of political strife, displaced and forced to leave their land and home to live in exile elsewhere. To this day, migrants constitute a majority of Bhiwandi’s population: a travelling population that moves cyclically. One respondent contextualizing the migratory nature of Bhiwandi’s population says, “If you drink water from here, you will come back”. At the heart of the story of Bhiwandi’s growth is what makes the region an interesting site for critical inquiries into transforming urbanities: the ethos of survivalism. Bhiwandi’s survivalist yearnings differ from those that inform, for instance, green lifestyle proponents and counter-culturalist back to the land movement (Horton & Horton, 2019). This survivalism is not about self-sufficiency but a more innate impulse to endure. It is about making do when the formal planning and governance processes fail a region.

Following independence in 1947, Bhiwandi-Nizampur expanded exponentially owing to rapid industrialisation. The influx of migrant labourers to the region caused the population of Bhiwandi to more than double in the 1980s. For Bhiwandi, this expansion also meant changes in the typologies of housing. The migrant communities carved out informal settlements in the absence of any formal housing schemes. Many Indian and Asian cities demonstrate this “self-organising way of forming space” (Shankar, 2012). These self-organising rituals have a set of rules and parameters that are innate to the communities enacting them. Traditional caste-based practices, new urban communities, and the materialities of space and technology are both (re)formed and (re)enforced through these practices. For instance, people migrating from the same region find it convenient to live in the same area while maintaining caste-based segregation. Thus, in the city, people of different caste groups from a location may live in close spatial proximity due to cultural affinities and yet continue to adhere to caste-based purity protocols (Parmar, 2023).

Moreover, planning in the peripheries has remained inadequate due to this transitional state. First, there is a lack of information about the complexities of such peri-urban locations. Also, when the peri-urban is inhabited by migrant communities -- like in Bhiwandi -- it leads to further disenfranchisement. Migrant communities are not voting populations, and there is little incentive to address their concerns (Gaikwad & Nellis, 2021). Bhiwandi’s isolation becomes very evident in the lack of train services catering to the region. As of April 2023, only eight mainline electric multiple unit (MEMU) train services operated along the Diva-Vasai corridor, allowing commuters to access Bhiwandi. The heatmap below shows the density of local trains in Mumbai. As we move away from the core city, the neighbourhoods/suburbs, even within MCGM (Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai) limits and also those beyond MCGM limits, are serviced by only one railway line. The stations within MCGM limits have a higher number of trains than those in the remote suburbs (Techcompuser, 2015).

Heat map showing the density of local trains and stations in the Mumbai metropolitan region

Bhiwandi’s unplanned urbanism emerges from its fierce survivalism. It is a city of contestation, crowding, and change, where industrialisation altered perceptions of time, space, geographies, and communities. For instance, with industrial growth as workers started migrating to Bhiwandi, small eateries were constructed for the migrant labourers, where they would pay a monthly fee to eat twice a day. New socialities and temporalities started emerging around these twice-a-day meals, significantly altering food practices that are intricately tied to people’s identity. Bhiwandi is a place where histories of being, future imaginaries, and present negotiations converge into a messy co-existence. These ill-defined spatiotemporal boundaries are baked into the very architecture of the city. Bhiwandi’s built environment is the material outcome of its chaotic urbanity and unplanned growth. They expanded in any available direction to accommodate the bulging population of the city, unresponsive to any bureaucratic control and planning strategies.

I do not endeavour to valorise this survivalism. Instead, I attempt to understand how this survivalism will be “fitted” – this is the term used by various state, parastate, and non-state actors to refer to the practice of uploading information contained in paper documents (informal) onto a digital portal (formal) -- into the formality of the digital realm as Bhiwandi adopts state espoused digitalisation. Badami (2018) asserts that Asian practices of repair (jugaad or the practice of natural, innate, and creative innovation in the face of material scarcity) will forever remain conceptually and ontologically outside the contours of formality and legality. Drawing on their hierarchization – along the lines of legitimacy -- of jugaad (Asian) and repair (Western) to espouse how the material has become the new terrain for the contestations of the boundaries of legality and formality, I attempt to understand Bhiwandi’s survivalism, its performance of spatial jugaads as it jostles with digitization and automation. The fieldwork is already revealing various tactics adopted by different actors to “adjust” informality, especially those related to land and property, using paper infrastructures within digital portals. The task for us as researchers studying digital transformation at the peripheries then is to place the city’s informality and survivalism beyond the binaries of legitimacy – to understand it as a continuum. Here, the relationships between the city and the residents, the objects and the actors, is that of informal survivalism. The advantage of such an approach would be that it highlights the relationality of survivalism at the margins without raising the question of legitimacy or, indeed, romanticizing the act of barely getting by. It places the individual’s existence within a continuum of socio-material relationships and affects, and the digital is best understood as a node in this continuum.

References

Badami, N., (2018). Informality as Fix: Repurposing Jugaad in the Post-Crisis Economy. Third Text, 32(1), 46–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2018.1442190

Gaikwad, N., & Nellis, G. (2021). Do Politicians Discriminate Against Internal Migrants? Evidence from Nationwide Field Experiments in India. American Journal of Political Science, 65(4), 790–806. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12548

Haynes, D. E., (2013). The Making of the Hyper-Industrial City in Western India: The Transformation of Artisanal Towns into Middle-Sized Urban Centres, 1930–1970. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 36(3), 336–353. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2013.829794

Horton, P., & Horton, B. P. (2019). Re-defining Sustainability: Living in Harmony with Life on Earth. One Earth, 1(1), 86–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2019.08.019

Parmar, S. S. (2023). The Internationalisation of Caste. Völkerrechtsblog. https://doi.org/10.17176/20230615-110944-0

Shankar, P., (2012). Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities. Bangalore: The Centre for Internet & Society.

Techcompuser. (2015). English: This is a heatmap showing the density of local trains and stations in Mumbai metropolitan region. Own work. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Heatmap_of_Mumbai_Local_Train_%26_Station_Density.jpeg